Indulge their narcissism: the Leibovitz trick to shooting stars

By Stuart Jeffries

May 4, 2008 — 10.00am

FIVE hours before John Lennon was shot dead in 1980, Annie Leibovitz photographed him naked. His arms and legs were wrapped lovingly, needily, around the fully clothed body of his wife, Yoko Ono. His lips pressed to her cheek, his eyes shut in bliss.

But that wasn't Leibovitz's original idea for the Rolling Stone cover. She had wanted him on his own, but Lennon insisted that his wife appear too. So Leibovitz suggested that the two pose together nude. Lennon obligingly began to strip, but Ono refused to take off her trousers. Without thinking about it much, Leibovitz recalled, she told Ono to keep all her clothes on.

"Then he curled up next to her and it was very, very strong. We took one Polaroid," said Leibovitz, "and the three of us knew it was profound right away." Lennon reportedly told her: "You've captured our relationship exactly. Promise me it'll be on the cover." It was, but not as planned: it appeared on the memorial issue for the murdered Beatle.

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But what had Leibovitz captured? "You couldn't help but feel that she was cold and he looked like he was clinging on to her." Which seems unfair: I can see Lennon's clinginess, but not Ono's chilliness.

The story of Lennon's last photo shoot undoes some of the mystique of how Leibovitz gets her subjects to disport themselves in daft, degrading, mildly titillating or otherwise compelling poses: sometimes at least, she has responded on the hoof to her celebrity subjects' annoying demands. She doesn't create a moment but is responsive to it, realising that the thing she's after is right there. But most professional snappers would say they could realise that too if they only had the same access to exhibitionist celebs as Leibovitz has had in the past 40 years. They, too, could have got the Queen to look wistful in a crown.

To be fair, Leibovitz can do jaunty, contrived composition too. Her picture of Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk subverts the glumly pious Riefenstahl-Mapplethorpe black-meets-white aesthetic by sheer dint of Goldberg's joyfully cheeky open-mouthed pose.

What Leibovitz often does is capture a striking image that flatters the sitter into thinking it discloses something profound, when it doesn't. Maybe that's what her lover Susan Sontag meant when she told Leibovitz: "You're good but you could be better."

But how did Leibovitz get Sting to stand in a bracingly ridiculous naked pose in the desert, covered in mud with hands coyly covering his tantrically accomplished genitals? How did she get Demi Moore to pose heavily pregnant, one hand cradling the heft of her bump, the other protecting readers' eyes from the sight of her nipple? How did she lure Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong to pose high and naked in the saddle of his racing bike? Or the voluptuous Scarlett Johansson and non-voluptuous Keira Knightley to lounge nudely in a double portrait, their daft rhyming pouts making the photo's wannabe sexy allure unintentionally hilarious?

Because Leibovitz will get them on the cover of the glossies. Because, in the narcissistic cesspool of modern celebrity, she is Echo. Because she gives her subjects what they want and the rest of us, well, we get what we are given and some of us like it.

Leibovitz said that when Sontag came into her life, "I wanted to do better things, take photographs that matter". Has she? Leibovitz has taken some fine photographs of her family, children and Sontag. They are intimate, convincing and unflashy, everything her more recent celebrity work has not been. But she has become something of a hack, an obliging furnisher of kitsch. It happens, particularly when you've been doing something too long.

Last month, for instance, her photo of US basketball star LeBron James and Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen caused a fuss. James had become the first African-American to figure on Vogue's cover, but some critics suggested it espoused racist stereotypes: he looked, they said, like the King Kong to her Fay Wray. James, it is worth pointing out, said he enjoyed the picture. We needn't: it brings two ho-hum stars together in a collision of cliches.

Or take her fascinatingly hideous 2006 shot of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, dandling Suri Cruise. In this frame, the couple close their eyes in Hollywood's vapid simulacrum of conjugal felicity (the opposite of the real thing that John and Yoko gave Leibovitz). Even now, it makes me want to Photoshop in a payload of manure falling on to them from a swooping helicopter.

Leibovitz held up a mirror to their smug narcissism and it refused to crack, damn it. No wonder she can get her subjects to do what she wants.